Free Tales from the Tent by Jess Smith Page A

into the bedroom, then shooed away the hens from the tousled bed, she may have seen on the pillow an impression,
clearly showing the mark not of one, but of two heads!

 
    9
    THE BANASHEN

    T hat is one of my all-time favourite stories. So where were we? Oh aye, this creepy place. I’m still sure you won’t believe me and
I’ll lose you on this one, folks, but if you can stay with me then its grateful I’ll be, because if you haven’t experienced the supernatural then why be a judge?
    I was the first to notice it. Mammy said there was nothing like it for spiralling through a damp washing and giving it a proper airing. Daddy said it put a grand heart into the fire. It sent wee
Tiny curling into a tight ball behind the trailer wheel for shelter, but to me it meant only one thing—the voice of a ‘Banashen.’ That cold, sharp breeze blowing along the
Earth’s floor, rising no higher than knee level, told me a spirit was angry. An elderly woman once informed me that if a grave were disturbed then many would come. I didn’t know what
she meant at the time, but before our stay’s end I found out all right, no doubting that!
    Apart from the cold breeze blowing round our ankles that Monday morning it was quite pleasant for September. The heather heads were deep purple and cornfields ripe for cutting. Daddy and Nicky
went off to spray-paint a farmer’s sheds, while Mammy and I went hawking. Since my confinement with Shirley in Glenrothes and that horrible paper mill, Mammy and I didn’t have many
cracks, so this day’s hawking would allow us time together. Anyhow, who could forget a day tramping amongst the kind country hantel of the Angus glens?
    Nicky’s wee brother Alan, their mother and her new man, big Wullie Young, who had arrived the night before, said they’d keep a heart in the fire and have soup ready for our return.
My Auntie Annie was previously married to Jock Macdonald. His family was known amongst travellers as powerful street fighters. They were as proud a clan as any that lived and breathed in Scotland,
and not only were they an extremely handsome folk, but their history tells of ancestors who held a circle of human shields around Charlie on the field at Culloden. All perished. They were thought
to be descended from Glen Coe. My mother’s younger sister, Mary, had married Charlie, brother of Jock.
    During mid-morning, big Wullie and the lassies went for a rout amongst the silver birch wood. Soon they came upon the circular granite structure of a mausoleum. This giant building, standing
about forty feet high, seemed an impregnable fortress. Undergrowth of thick ivy and gorse bush dominated its lower part. Sisters Mary and Babsy were desperate to see inside, but Renie wasn’t
so keen. She was our seventh sister, and although she never accepted it there was in her the power of the eye. Not, may I earnestly add, ‘the evil eye’, but rather that of the sixth
sense. ‘Come on, big Wullie,’ she begged, ‘don’t you go looking for a way in there. It’s a sacred place, and gives me the jitters.’
    Big Wullie found Renie’s fear quite disturbing and ushered the lassies away. Our Mary, however, was as curious a thirteen-year-old as you’d find anywhere and laughed off
Renie’s warnings. She spied a broken branch hanging from the high bank over onto the wall. ‘Come on, Babsy, that’s our way in,’ she called. She hoisted Babsy up by the arm,
and in no time the duo were out of sight and half way up the branch before big Wullie could stop them.
    ‘You two bisoms get down here this instant, before the polis or a laird o’ some kind spots ye breakin’ an’ enterin’.’ He needed to raise his voice and shout
my sisters down, but if you’d ever heard the roar from him then you’d know the whole of Kirrie would hear. He was aware of this, so told Renie to go back home, and that he’d fetch
the girls down himself. She didn’t need telling twice, and was soon gone out of the